


Three-Thirty

by scavengertrash



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anonymous Sex, Character Death, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hallmark Christmas movie, Kidnapping, Knifeplay, Knotting, Light Bondage, Mugging, Semi-Public Sex, Size Kink, i don't even know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-09-28 14:25:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17184683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scavengertrash/pseuds/scavengertrash
Summary: Rey takes on extra odd jobs at Maz's microbrewery to afford presents for her new friends at her first ever real Christmas, but on her last night of work, she runs into some trouble with a mugger on the train home. It takes an unexpected turn.





	1. Chapter 1

Chicago is fucking freezing this time of year, and Rey's never been less prepared in her life. She's never spent a Christmas outside of Arizona. There, she'd always prided herself on her ability to wear shorts year-round and tough out the chill that never really dipped below 30. (It had admittedly been a product of a foster father — the term loosely applied — who would not spend his monthly checks on winter clothes she'd get only six weeks of use out of. That didn't matter because it had become a point of pride for her anyway.)

Not coincidentally, it's her first Christmas with people who are actually planning to celebrate with her, which is why she knows she needs to do it right. Poe and Finn and Rose are absolute blessings, cheerful and earnest and warm in ways she has never known people to be. They're _real._ It's particularly shocking up here in the North, which was so high-power and so culturally different from the work-hardened but sincere climate of Arizona.

They might be the first people who've ever cared about her in her life. She wants them to maintain their good impression. She wants to be _deserving_ of that good impression.

Thus she's taken on a third temp job, pulling a double in a microbrewery near Lincoln Park. When she'd first moved there, before she'd gotten hired on as an engineer at Resistance Construction, she'd started at Han's garage, and he was the one who'd hooked her up with a few scarce shifts this season with an old friend of his, Maz Kanata. 

And so, at three AM, with every bar in Chicago closed, she bid Maz a goodnight, took her undeclared tips, and trudged towards the train stop. They were only coming every thirty minutes now, and she'd narrowly missed the 3:30 train, but she had enough money in her wallet to get her friends something worthwhile for the holiday, something that would really show what they mean to her.

The train platform is empty.

Even in this modern age of suppressants, scarcity makes it frowned upon for an omega to travel around this late. Rey's too stubborn to let anything like her designation stop her, and too cheap for rideshare when she has a monthly pass for the train. Besides, those unsavory remarks about omegas asking for it and getting molested on trains, they're mostly old wives' tales about heats and small spaces. Most people who get molested on trains aren't omegas (there aren't that many omegas left), and most omegas aren't stupid enough to get in such a cramped car at a delicate time unless they're _really_ desperate.

Still, it's better to be stay aware of a situation like this, so Rey takes out her headphones and stuffs them into her heavy winter jacket, which is new to her but bought secondhand and already covered in holes and grease. Rey has never seen much point in getting herself nice things if she was only going to wear them hard, like she did everything she owned. She tries to keep her hands in her pockets to warm them, but her nose is colder, so she cups them in front of her face instead and breaths heavily into the hollow to try and bring feeling back to it.

When the train arrives, and she gets in the back car, it's empty too. Right up until the last minute before the doors close, when a towering man all in black enters in a hurry.

They are the only two in the car, and Rey does some immediate math. If he is safe, he will move towards the front, away from her. He doesn't. Instead, he lingers near the doorway, using one of the handholds despite a wealth of unoccupied seats. It makes him look taller. She can't make out his face under his scarf, not entirely, but when the doors slide closed, his dark eyes lock on her.

The train car sways as it gets rolling. She glances out the window while they emerge from the platform tunnel. Silence carries between them. She has five stops before hers — about a thirty minute ride. He could get off on any one of them, or he could get off on hers and follow her back to the apartment.

She lifts her chin and looks back at him. She almost falters. He's still staring. But Rey gathers up her resolve and says in her most accusatory voice, too tired for more customer service, "Aren't you going to sit down?"

"I don't want to miss my stop," he replies without blinking.

His voice is a low base, thick and warm like a down blanket. Like his eyes and his broad shoulders, his voice has the feeling of a threat that she can't put her finger on. If he's so eager not to miss his stop, then it must be soon. She waits two stops, but he's still lingering there, watching her.

So she tries again.

"Which stops is yours?"

"Isn't it rude to start conversations on trains?" He reaches up to tap the side of his head, just above where his ears must be hiding under that mass of dark hair. "Maybe I just wanted to listen to my audiobook."

"There are other empty cars," she replies. "If you're going to attack me, I'd like to get out in front of it."

He doesn't laugh. It's the sort of brazen remark that anyone who _wasn't_ planning to attack her should have laughed at for how outrageous it is. But this man doesn't laugh. In fact, he doesn't react.

The train stops again. Two stops before hers, but at this point, she'll take her chances in the street instead of an empty car. No one has gotten on in the time they'd been riding together. He turns around and gets off of the train before she does, heads up the stairs and away from the platform. And then, just for a moment, she thinks that maybe she's overreacted.

Arizona was never dangerous. Public transport was mostly busses, and it was mostly packed with working people just like her. But she'd been raised to worry about the dangers of the city; maybe she had just been projecting. Maybe that man really was just trying to listen to his audiobook.

Whoever he was, it doesn't matter.

The train doors close behind her before she can think better of getting off early. For a whole two minutes she waits and debates with waiting for the next one, but it'll be thirty minutes at least. By the time she turns around to head off the platform, her stranger is already up the stairs and out of sight. Now that she's less afraid, she's aware that she probably just seemed rude.

"Merry Christmas," she mutters to the cool air as she steps up onto the snowy street.

She knows her way from here, and there's a short cut faster than walking along the tracks. She cuts down an alley beside a café, right across from a record store that sometimes puts on acoustic shows in the basement. She can hear someone downstairs, probably getting things set up for an early opening. That's been the strangest part of moving to a city like Chicago. That brief breath at 3 AM is quickly swallowed by the early risers, like it was never there.

She knows this place. It's safe. She's practically at her apartment, really.

So it catches her off guard, despite all her preparation, when a hand covers her mouth from behind and she is pulled flush against another body. Panic bubbles out of Rey's mouth in a muffled cry. She fights and wrestles and gets her mouth free to say, "Let me go. I'll scream."

"Do you think that will help?"

It's the same voice from before. The man from the train. She feels a cold point flick out against her throat, and she aborts the motion of releasing a yell.

"What do you want?" She hisses instead.

"You really should consider carrying a purse. I could have taken it and been gone already."

"You want my wallet?"

"Yes. Hand it over. This will be easier if you do."

She's being insulted by a mugger for not being an easier, more feminine target. Isn't that just the icing on the cake. She wrestles and gets her elbow into his ribs.

"OW!"

 _That's the idea,_ she thinks. This guy didn't really expect her to just cough up whatever he wanted, did he? The compacted snow crunches further and force them to slide as they scuffle. He reacts quickly to bowl forward and drive her into the wall.

The knife catches against her throat again, and her breath stops. The sudden slice is arresting, and she can feel the spot warm as blood pools. God, she hates snow.

She grabs his wrist and tries to knock his hand against the concrete. Maybe get him to drop the knife, but he doesn't. He uses his other hand to tear her scarf away, and she lets out a protesting grunt when she hears the fabric rip.

Bastard. That was her only scarf.

He stops then, and she wonders briefly if maybe she'd said that aloud. It'd be a strange thing to provoke a stroke of conscience, but despite her usual feelings towards pity, she'd take it. Instead, his grip on her tightens, and his voice sounds strained as he says, "You're an omega."

Oh, shit.

"Let me go," she keeps her voice clear even as it wavers on hearing that.

Most people have never met an alpha or omega in their lives. Most people prefer it that way. They're odd and alien and confusing, perhaps even primitive. Definitely inscrutable in a mostly beta population that had been mostly happy to see them go.

People who hadn't met them knew about them through history lessons which suggested that the omega population had dwindled into response to some alpha cultural shifts, which allowed the alpha population to explode without omegas to check them. People like Leia Organa put into place policies that limited alpha breeding practices.

— that's how Rey had heard about them, back when she'd believed herself to be a beta too, when she hadn't cared about the specifics. Before she'd arrived in Chicago and introduced herself to the radical practice of _eating complete meals_. Before her doctor had broken it to her that she'd be due for a _heat_ soon.

But even thinking they didn't apply to her at the time, Rey remembers those lessons well enough to know that if this man can tell she's an omega immediately, then he's no beta, and that makes him dangerous.

"What kind of fucking omega rides the train alone at three in the fucking morning?" A bad one. That's what. She feels a pang of guilt because it sounds like he's blaming her with the way he snarls that question. It sounds like he's afraid of the reaction he's having. She's afraid too. "Is that why you talked to me? Were you just waiting to find an alpha stupid enough to knot you?"

Stupid enough? That didn't make any sense. He must have gotten a very different education on alpha-omega dynamics than she did, skipped the parts about how necessary omegas were to calming alphas.

But some things hold true regardless of perspective and lens. She can feel it now — the heat of his body and a very discernible bulk pressing into the small of her back. And the smell. Thick alpha musk that's getting through his heavy winter clothing now. Even the crisp winter air can't carry it away fast enough. It dizzies her in the bad way that feels so, so, so good to some parts of her, even as her rational mind screams protest.

"I had to work." She sounds pathetic saying it, like she's actually apologizing to this crazed alpha mugging her for accidentally setting him off. Like she really does want him to forgive her and tell her she's not a shitty omega after all, even though she know she is and she doesn't care because as far as anyone else is concerned that's a compliment. "It's Christmas. I had an extra shift."

It's all pointless babble. She doesn't think it matters to him at all why she needed to work an extra shift. It just comes out because it's something to say.

He buries his face in her neck, and it's cold. She can feel that he has pulled his own scarf away just to get his skin against hers. She shudders as he inhales her scent. He isn't answering — grappling with something inside his own head rather than anything she has to say. That doesn't bode well for the end of this encounter, especially not given that she can feel it too, a surge of wet that seeps into her pants and leaves her colder for it.

"You were there for _me_ ," he says decisively, ignoring all her protesting and facts. "My omega."

It's the kind of thing that Rey has always said would make her run. She'd been treated like property before, in her group home in Arizona, abused for labor. She won't let anyone else treat her that way again. Except this stranger's voice sounds so sweet saying it, like when he says it, he means that she is precious to him. His to love and protect and take care of — not his to control and own.

No. God, no, she's not going to get caught in this. It's nearly four in the morning, it's below freezing, and this goddamn psychopath is trying to rob her. Damn her hormones and damn him!

"Rey. My name is Rey." Not omega. Maybe it will humanize her. She pants out the words like she's been running a marathon, but really it's just the flush of arousal hitting her lungs. "Please. Let me go. I just want to go home. I have Christmas presents I need to buy today for my family."

"You don't have a family."

The certainty with which he says it makes her go cold.

"How could you know?"

"You haven't checked your phone since you got on the train. You're young; someone should be waiting up for you. But they're not, are they?"

"Stop."

"No one knows you're here. No one cares." She squeezes her eyes shut, fighting tears. This is wrong. All wrong. Somehow it stings worse coming from him, from this man who her whole body is screaming ought to be taking care of her. "I know what it's like to be alone, Rey."

He is almost certainly projecting. Later, when she is warm in her bed after showering this mess off of her five times over, she will recognize that. But in this moment, it feels like he has glimpsed the dark and secret parts of her soul on a train at three in the morning, like he knows her better than even her friends who she loves so much.

Her knees buckle.

"You're not alone, Rey." He mumbles it against her scent gland, and her cunt aches. A sudden pulse that nearly takes her down.

A long heady pause invites her to agree, to relent, but she doesn't. Dazed as she is, she bites down hard on her tongue. She's never needed it so badly, never craved anyone like this, but she won't be a slave to her urges.

He doesn't seem bothered. Instead of relenting, he says, "I'll show you."

His grip on the knife grows firmer and he drags the point down between her breasts, popping the buttons of her winter coat. She shudders as each thread snaps. Two of the buttons ping off metal garbage cans. It occurs to her distantly to protest, but the words never come out. Then he brings the knife blade up under her shirt, once her jacket is open, and saws through the flat bridge between her bra cups. The blade slides over her skin as the slack of her bra loosens and they fall away.

"Tell me what you want, omega."

She shakes her head vigorously, lips sealed tight.

"Don't be afraid. You came looking for this. You would have taken any alpha knot you could get."

"No."

"No?" He reaches around with his other hand, slides it down the front of her pants, inside her underwear. She's sticky with need, wet and desperate. Shame colors her cheeks. " _Yes."_

"No." She insists it. She wants to say that she didn't want this, doesn't want it, but the proof is there and in how she aches for him. If he were to let her go, she might die. So instead she says, "Just you."

It doesn't matter that it can't possibly be true. It's the lie they both want to believe to justify this reaction, one which gives him permission to finally pull his hand out of her pants so he can instead yank them down around her thighs. The other hand slides up between her breasts, sticking out of her shirt collar to press the knife back at her throat.

At her confused noise, he apologetically notes, "I can't take any chances with such a spirited little omega."

And so with a knife pressed into the flesh of her throat, he bares her to him. Rey goes dead quiet, not even daring to breathe lest she miss a noise of his reaction. His palm slides along the curve of her ass, then his fingers dip into the crease, searching and pressing — finally — into the sopping folds of her cunt. She lets out a cry — not a scream ,as she had promised. Not yet. And then he intakes a breath, sliding two fingers along her to part her folds, to open her up to the frigid air.

"Perfect," he announces his judgment and the omega in her _preens._ "You're so wet for me, aren't you? You could have asked me to give this to you on the train, Rey. I would have. I would give you anything you want."

It doesn't even occur to her then to want to go home, to want to be left alone. All she wants is him. She pushes her ass back, trying to urge his fingers inside by tilting her hips carefully. He allows it, shifts his hand to slip two in together. They're so much bigger than hers, so good, so thick, that she keens her satisfaction and almost drowns out the sound of him telling her how good she is at taking him, how soft and warm and wet and perfect, how good she'll feel wrapped around his cock.

"Please." She's practically drooling at this point, slurring the word. "Please, I need it."

"I know you do." His fingers straighten, plunge deliberately into her, but oh, it's not enough. Not even close to enough. She's never had an alpha's knot before. Suddenly, it's all she can think about. She's never actually cum from penetration alone — can she? _Will she?_ It's a foregone conclusion now, and she's not counting on the fucking mugger she picked up on the train to put much thought towards getting her off.

She hasn't thought about the rest of what comes with the knot. She's working very hard, in fact, at _not_ thinking about it.

Then she feels it. The head of his cock, sliding between her folds. The whole shaft plunges along the length of her cunt, thrusts into the gap of her thighs. She tightens up, squeezing her every muscle as she realizes just how _big_ he is. A shiver races up her spine. Goosebumps prickle her shoulders.

Maybe this was a mistake.

It's too late for that kind of thinking, though. Apparently the concerted thrust wasn't designed to taunt her into second thoughts about the size of his cock — what right does a common fucking criminal have to a cock like that? The _nerve_ — but rather a way of getting his cock wet enough for him to press into her.

Because he does, then. Press into her. And it's suddenly all she can focus on, which is a relief really from the terrible cold, because he's hot and thick and stretching her so pleasantly, it feels like being split open and pieced back together.

"Perfect," he murmurs against her ear. "Do you feel that, Rey?"

She nods, lost for words in an effort to keep quiet. This is her neighborhood after all. Somebody could _see._ Somehow humiliation wins out over the convenience of a secondary witness — or a witness at all.

She hasn't seen this alpha's face. She doesn't know his name.

That's around the time he finishes sliding inside of her. Buried to the hilt, he just holds her there for a moment, collecting himself. His breath is ragged in her ear. She's heard stories about alpha ruts, about betas who came out of it bruised or in the emergency room. If she'd set him to something like that, she has to wonder if she's staring down the barrel of the same. She hasn't even had a heat yet.

"I want to hear you," he growls that out as he thrusts into her again, gripping around her abdomen with one hand to pull her swiftly against him. It drives him deep, deep enough to bottom out, and she lets out a yelp that's half-grunt. "Tell me how my cock feels."

"Good." She rushes out the words.

"How good?"

God, did his ego really need this? Despite her judgment, Rey finds herself wanting to satisfy, wanting to give him everything he wants so that he'll stay and knot her.

"So good," she rushes out the words, voice raised, lilting as he drives in again, wobbly with satisfaction. "Oh! Perfect. Please, please, keep going."

"You like that? Are you gonna come all over my cock, little omega?"

Not like this, she isn't. She makes a little grunted noise of encouragement. A wan reply, but anything else would be dishonest. She'd thought she would be seeing stars or something, but so far, while his cock's plenty good, and she's hornier than she's ever been, it's still just a cock. And she needs _more._ Rey rocks her hips a little, trying to shift the angle.

"Oh. You still think you can pretend you don't want this." Rey's mouth opens and an indignant noise comes out, but then his hand slides down her abdomen to find her clit, two fingers pressed over it, and it turns into a choked, hungry sound instead. "I'm going to ruin this sweet cunt of yours, Rey. I'm going to fill it with my cum. And I'm going to bring you there with me."

Oddly considerate for a stalker and a thief. Maybe there is something to that nonsense about alphas looking after their omegas after all. Rey certainly wants to believe so, now, with his fingers against her clit and his cock plunging into her, splitting her open again and again and again until all she can do is gasp and shudder.

He gets quieter, slower, focused when he nears his own end, and Rey takes up some of the slack to try and fuck herself onto him, to keep up the pace, a steady string of whimpers pouring out of her.

"Please," she sputters. "Keep going, keep going, I'm almost—"

She gets tighter as she gets closer, and she can hear him make inhuman sounds trying to hold onto control. Pride swells in her chest. He's never had it so good. He'll stay with her, take care of her, he'll choose her for his mate. She wants to feel his nose back at her mating gland, wants him to bite down hard and give her something more permanent. The intensity of her readiness frightens her.

This, she decides, this is what people warned her about where omega hormones were concerned.

He loses control seconds before she tips over the edge. It's not the insistent strokes of his fingertips that gets her, though his timing is steady, nor is it the angle of his cock inside of her. Rather, the warm spill of his cum awakens some primal part of her brain. Later it will be replaced with paranoid panic as she scrambles to get her hands on plan B, but for now she's thrilled by the thought of him mating her, breeding her. She wants more of his cum, wants an endless steady flood, wants it all over her, smeared into her skin, into her mating gland, and —

When his knot swells, it tips her over the rest of the way. The sudden, aching expansion that locks her in place causes such a sudden, startling stretch that she cries out. It blocks off her entrance, widens it almost painfully, and in doing so spreads her folds wider, exposing her clit better to his rough fingertips.

She screams then, a strangled howl that carries through the alley. Four in the morning. Four in the fucking morning and she's bent half against a wall, some stranger's knot swollen in her cunt, screaming as she comes all around it.

More cum spills out of him in turn, milked out by the way her inner muscles clamp around his knot. She shudders her way through it, a fluttering of muscle that ripples out through her limbs too after the fact. She's weak. Her body buckles then, and the stranger follows her to the ground, bowing over her.

Snow sticks to her knees and starts seeping through her pants while she catches her breath, coming down from the high.

Neither of them speaks for a long time. Apparently, neither of them know what to say. It could be that they're both surprised by how intense it was; it could be that they're both feeling guilty knowing that it was their hormones playing off one another despite their circumstances. Whatever the reason, Rey is the first one to speak finally.

"How long does this take?" She's trembling still. Persistently.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"I've never knotted an omega before," he hisses it out uncomfortably, as though she might say it louder and someone else could hear. As if they hadn't already heard. As if the entire neighborhood wasn't already aware that Rey had let a mugger give her the best fuck of her life.

It processes a second later. _I've never knotted an omega before._ She's his first. He sounds positively disgusted with himself, ashamed, but also warm. Hesitant.

In her silence, he asks, "Do you … need anything?"

"New clothes." She says it flatly first. New buttons for her new jacket and a new bra to replace those he'd ruined. Then, laughing, she adds, "Gifts for my friends."

This time he says nothing. They stay like that, as it turns out, for fifteen minutes. She's getting her pants back up as Ms. Connix comes out of her flower shop to start setting up signs. The alpha has been quicker than she was, though. He'd tucked himself away and vanished. When she pats the back pocket of her jeans after she's fully dressed again, her wallet's gone.

" _Shit!"_

After all that. Her clothes are drenched in fluids and the fastenings are ruined. She's late to get home to sleep. And that whole night of tips was for nothing.

 _Shit_ indeed.

She trudges home and collapses onto the couch, tears freshly rolling into the pillow that she buries her face in.

It's only two hours until her alarm goes off for her regular work schedule, and Rey has to pick herself back up and shower it all off and despite the soreness in her cunt and her legs and her heart, she has to go through the motions of work, staring at Finn in the office across the way and knowing that she's going to come up empty where his gift is concerned.

That should be the least of her worries, but it's easier to process than the rest. She hadn't even considered calling the cops — she deals with her problems by herself.

She's going to have to deal with this one too. That's what she settles on during her walk home. She skips the train this time, walking the whole way, even though it's a completely different route. When she hits the stairs for her building, she gets out her phone and texts Finn:

 

> _> I wanna talk to you about something RE: Christmas._

 

She makes her way through the red door of her apartment and tugs off her boots and drops her keys in the bowl by the door and gets as far as throwing her phone down onto the couch before she looks down and realizes that there's something in the way of her depression nap.

A series of boxes. Wrapped, in fact, so maybe packages is the right word. As she starts to look through them, she finds nametags: Rose, Finn, Poe, and _her._ It's bewildering. An actual fucking Christmas miracle, in fact. But when she opens the package with her name on it, she discovers that inside is her wallet — including her ID, her cards, and exactly zero cash.

But in its place, there's a note.

 

> _To make up for the inconvenience, I took the liberty of fixing your problem. Maybe I'll see you again on our commute._
> 
> _\- Ben._
> 
>  

She doesn't even fucking know a Ben. So she goes through the rest of the gifts. There are three others for her, and as she opens them, it all comes together. One has a jacket in it, her size. The next is a bra, not exactly her size, but a generous estimation that she really ought to take as a compliment.

Except that it sinks in then that _Ben_ must be the name of the psychopath alpha who'd taken her wallet in the first place. Stolen it from her, and … what? Bought the gifts she was already planning on buying? He hadn't bothered to put her cash back in, or any indicator of what the gifts he'd gotten for her friends were, so maybe he'd just swung by the dollar store.

Besides that, he'd fucking _broken into her apartment._ The card key for the building is still there, though how he'd bypassed her door she didn't know. And —

… And the card key for her work at Resistance Construction was gone. She frowned, puzzling over that for longer than it really deserved until Finn texted her back.

Rey grabbed her phone.

 

> _Everything okay? <_

 

Oh, hell. She pushes her hair back out of her face and looks over at the stack of gifts beside her. Bewildered, she covers her mouth briefly.

They don't really need to know about this. Not in the slightest.

 

> _> Yeah._
> 
> _> Is there gonna be food?_
> 
>  
> 
> _There'd better be. <_
> 
> _Don't worry, you don't have to bring anything unless you want to. <_
> 
>  

She invites Finn out to Maz's microbrewery that weekend, and they stay til it closes. Outside in the blustering cold, he offers to escort her home when he hears she's going by train, especially since —

"You look sick," he makes it an accusaton of her red face and her warm skin and the way she seems so dazed and touchy. Rey only waves him off. She's been feeling feverish, but she's hanging in there. It's just part of the Chicago work culture to tough it out.

"Don't worry about me. Go home. Sleep."

Even as skeptical as Finn remains, they separate with warm assurances that they'll see each other on Tuesday for Christmas.

Then Rey heads down to the train platform and waits for the three-thirty train.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey takes Ben up on his offer to meet her again on the train, and she goes into heat. It offers them the chance to talk through some of his messier attitudes on alpha/omega dynamics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS SUPER WASN'T GOING TO HAPPEN, but then a bunch of people were into it, so I made a continuation. In theory there will be at least a third piece. I'm not sure when it will arrive, but someday. I know it's not precisely what people wanted, but I like revealing Ben's values and attitudes through Rey's POV as a device.

Rey has gone to work for Maz five times so far, and each time, it's been on a weekday. Maz expressed some guilt about not being able to give Rey a better shift where she'd earn better tips, but Rey had always written it off. No one went to Lincoln Park to get plastered, no matter what night of the week it was.

When she comes down on that train platform on Friday night after parting ways with Finn to see two dozen drunks staggering about the platform, Rey realizes that she'd been _dead_ wrong.

It was a stupid idea anyway, coming here looking for Ben.

That's a small comfort to offer herself now when she had already surveyed the gifts with some skeptical amusement, accepted them as they were, and decided to leave them wrapped and see what it amounted to when Finn and Poe and Rose opened them next week. When she had already taken to keeping that note in her pocket because it smelled vaguely like him and because she'd spent the better part of four days debating getting on this train again.

She'd woken up in the middle of the night twice this week, drenched in sweat, thinking of meeting him alone in the same train car and giving herself over to him. She's tried to imagine his face. His eyes were dark and hungry and his nose had seemed prominent. Both times she had woken up with his name on her lips and a disappointed ache that her vibrator could only barely satisfy.

She really must be desperate.

She scrubs her hands over her face, sobering up a bit, though her cheeks still feel flushed. Just her luck to come down with something around the holidays after all those extra shifts she picked up. She parks herself at the edge of the platform, soundly away from the revelers, and waits.

The train comes through at three-thirty. He's nowhere on the platform. She waits a few moments longer, then reluctantly boards.

The car is packed — more packed than the platform, with nowhere to sit, and only the barest of room to stand. Rey has never been a partier — she's not used to brushing elbows with this sort of attitude. Any time she'd stayed out this late in the past, it'd been for work, or with just a few friends. Now she's in a train car that smells like a frat house for the next thirty minutes all because she'd been hoping to gag herself on some alpha's knot.

It was _insane._ It was —

"You can sit here," says a familiar, rumbling voice.

There's no scarf over his mouth this time, so she can see the whole picture of his face when she turns around this time. Moles and freckles pock his face like constellations, but they're hardly noticeable around his pronounced nose and his full, red mouth and the long ragged scar that runs down his cheek.

It would be inappropriate to consider how eager she is to get those lips between her thighs, especially with how full the car is. It's still the first thought to cross her mind. The second is that she wants to know how he got that scar. If he has killed people. That very real possibility somehow doesn't put her off the way it should.

He's studying her too, she realizes. He's seen her, so it can't be that. No. He's trying to take stock of her reaction.

Maybe he's afraid she's only here to get a better description and call the police. Honestly, until right this moment, the thought had never occurred to her. She handles her own problems.

Right now, she's handling them by walking over and standing before him. He obviously meant to give his seat up for her. He'd ridden the car _to_ the Lincoln Park station this time. Been on it before any of those on the platform ever had. Did that mean he hadn't arrived with her at the station last time? She'd guessed he was from this area, but now —

It doesn't matter.

Instead of waiting for him to give up his seat, she turns and parks herself right on his lap. The suddenness of the gesture earns only cursory looks from the couple passengers who have noticed that they arrived separately and are perhaps distantly concerned that Rey is drunk enough to let this strange man have his way with her — _if only they knew_ — but most people are themselves too drunk to recognize what's happened.

"You won't be able to rob anyone if I'm here," she points out.

"Pity." He says it without feeling. "They're easy targets."

The train rocks as the doors close and it starts rattling down the tracks. A warm jolt pangs in her belly and spreads up her spine, dispersing out into her limbs. Her eyes flutter. This is not the reunion she had imagined (probably not the one he'd imagined either — had he thought she'd thank him for the gifts? She's wondered), but it's perhaps a good one to have.

Like this, he'll have to actually give her the courtesy of a conversation.

"I want my keycard back."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do." She keeps her jaw tight. "You gave me back my wallet, but you kept my keycard for work. I need that. I've had Finn letting me in all week."

"Do you really want to have this conversation now?" His voice is rough.

She looks back at him, curious, and only then notices that his hands have found her hips, gripping her through the overcoat he'd replaced. Something is eating him.

"We could talk about what you said instead."

He clearly doesn't want to be _talking_ at all, but he still asks, "What's that?"

"You said I was waiting for 'an alpha stupid enough to knot me.'" She announces that too loudly for the public space. But like before, most of them are too drunk. "What does that mean? What's _stupid_ about knotting an omega? It's what you're built for."

"It sounds romantic when you put it that way, doesn't it?"

Rey looks peeved. She _is_ peeved. It's not his business to call out whether she is or isn't a romantic like this, and she won't be baited into calling any of what happened between them romantic. It wasn't. It was feral and fumbling and should have been quickly forgotten. Instead, she's here, aching for it all the same. It's not romantic — it's pathetic. She _knows_ it's pathetic.

"That depends on the circumstances."

"No, it doesn't. Whatever way you cut it, you're enslaving an alpha. Making our lives _less_."

"You're out of your mind. Alphas and omegas take care of one another."

When she glances back to glimpse his reaction, she can see it. Fury darkens his expression, and fueling it, certainty. That should unsettle her. It doesn't. Instead, she can feel a dampness pool in her underwear. As far as her hormones are concerned, that was the look she'd come here to see.

He changes the subject before she can address that anger, before she can press him on the fact that omegas are _essential_ to an alpha having a life at all.

"You shouldn't have come tonight."

"You _asked me to,_ Ben."

She uses his name like they're old friends, like it's not the first time. And it feels natural and good and right, even though she'd already been knotted to him never knowing it. His expression twitches.

One of the thick-bodied Korean girls chatting next to them loses her grip on the pole and goes sliding. When she almost falls into them, Rey catches her. She keeps her hands in designated safe zones. It's a temporary distraction, but Rey tears back into Ben as soon as she's helped the poor girl right herself.

" _You_ didn't give me another way to reach you."

"So you boarded a crowded train in _heat?"_ He snarls it out in a low voice, reaching up to grab her around the ribcage and pull her into him tighter. Only then does she notice the firm erection he's obscuring. Only then does she process fully how many people are around them. They really aren't paying attention. "If you had boarded a car full of alphas, would you have invited them to take turns with you? You are _mine."_ Then, with only a breath in between to consider, he goes cold. "You came here to lure me into—"

"Stop that." She grabs for his hand and bends his middle finger back until he lets his grip up. "I'm not luring anyone. What are you _talking about?"_

"Liar," he hisses.

"I'm not _lying._ You're the one who followed me onto this train. I know you did. Don't deny it. I didn't just happen to be there — you've been watching me." Even if he could have pulled her address from her ID card, he'd had her friends' _names._ He'd taken her work card. "Stop pretending that you didn't want me here, and answer my question. _What_ are you talking about?"

"What kind of omega doesn't know how to tell when she's entering heat?"

"A bad one." She snaps it out. If he rubs that in one more time, honestly, she's not going to be responsible for what she does to him. But there is the matter of information; he has it, she doesn't. So she imparts her doctor's assessment reluctantly. "My heat isn't due for another three months."

Something occurs to him then, but she doesn't see what it is. In his eyes, though, she sees him calculating something. If anyone is luring, she thinks, it's him. Abruptly, Rey decides that she doesn't like it.

"It's starting now." He inhales deeply of her neck. Another gush of fluid strikes her on realizing that he is breathing in the smell of her arousal. The way his hips twitch confirms that as much as anything. Maybe it's overeager to be soaking through her panties already. She has the good sense to squirm in his lap, aware enough of the damp feeling as to worry that he might feel it, somehow. "A few hours at most. You don't recognize the symptoms?"

"What sympt— _Oh!"_

She bounces slightly as he gets one of his hands between her thighs and presses against her cunt. That's a yes, then. He _can_ feel how wet she has become. Shame burns hot in her cheeks and she searches around to see if anyone has noticed. As far as anyone here is concerned, she's just a beta getting handsy with her drunk boyfriend.

"I didn't pick it up until you were close. But soon, any alpha on this train will be able to scent you." She really hopes there aren't any other alphas on this train, but in that moment she is certain that if there were, they wouldn't get their hands on her before he tore them apart. He was broad-shouldered, huge, strong. His voice grows rougher as he finally asks, "… You really didn't notice?"

"I've never had a heat before."

His hands pull back like he's touched a hot stove. Impulse. Of course, most omegas manifest when they're in their early teens. Anyone would be equally discomfited by the notion — such a sexually immature omega pushing twenty. But reason catches up, and she's spared the explanation that he's _seen her ID card,_ knows where she works, of course she's not a teenager.

His hands settle back on her. Contact, at this point, feels like finding religion. Maybe Ben's onto something about her heat.

Fear starts to climb up her throat. If he's right about that, then he's right that she's made herself a target. Even if she gets off the train, she has the walk to her apartment to worry about. In some capacity, it's a relief — she can write off her desire for Ben as just a product of heat and a convenient alpha target. It's not about him at all. But it doesn't erase the practical concerns of a heat she's not prepared for, couldn't possibly be prepared for.

"Lucky I'm around, then."

That's all he says.

He doesn't continue interrogating her as to why she wouldn't have had a heat sooner. He doesn't doubt her. He just accepts it. Or he's already figured it out. Suddenly, Rey feels exposed in a way she hadn't felt even when he'd had her ass bare before the whole fucking neighborhood last time.

"Is it luck?"

He hadn't acknowledged her accusation before. Even now, with her eyes boring into his, his long and smoldering gaze holds hers for some time before he says slowly, "No."

She doesn't know what to do with that. He, apparently, doesn't either.

The train pulls to a stop, but it's not hers. They've still got twenty minutes to ride this out together.

"Can you stop … _grinding._ " He sounds tense. She hadn't realized she was doing it, but looking down, his knuckles are white where he bruises her hips in the effort to keep her still. Rey's breath catches in her chest.

"Sorry." Then, "It wasn't on purpose. I'm not—" Then, self-denial setting in, she feels it. "It hurts if I don't have something."

He looks here and there around the train car, tracking the amount of attention directed towards them for the time being. His fingers brush along the seam of her pants.

"I'll help you." He murmurs it against her ear. "Whatever you need."

That promise sounds more tainted now. He doesn't actually want that at all. Rey still has exactly enough faculties, out of her heat, to recognize that it might be the product of her hormones affecting him, that maybe it also explained the gesture that had brought her here tonight.

Disappointment weighs heavy in her chest.

He doesn't wait for an answer, thankfully, before he starts rubbing her deliberately through the fabric, massaging it into her clit, allowing the material to chafe, to thrill her. Rey squirms and pulls her ratty scarf off, balling it in her lap to hide his movements.

This she allows him. She's painfully sensitive to the movements, or maybe just because he's the one performing the act, and his pheromones are responding to hers. Whatever it is, it has her turning her head to nuzzle against the side of his face. She offers up a soft, grateful sound.

But then he says it. "I can't help you the way I want to here."

"Try." She sounds faintly helpless. " _Try."_

He's pressed against her ass. He thrusts up once, twice. A guttural noise gets swallowed against her throat, right over her scent gland, and her whole body _pulses._ The slick sticking between her thighs is more, now, like she's sat in a puddle. Soon, betas or not, the whole car will be able to smell her musky arousal.

There's nothing subtle about the way they're rutting against one another anymore. A couple clinging to the standing bar near the train doors looks over, speaking in a voice that was probably meant to be a whisper. But it's loud in Rey's ears.

_What are they doing?_

_Don't watch!_

_If they didn't want people to watch, they wouldn't do it here._

And some part of her screams that they're right, that she can think of nothing better than to let her alpha claim her here, that everyone might see that they belong to each other. There's an itch building in the gland on her neck, pronounced and distracting.

Rey reaches up to pull his mouth down there, huffing out a needy noise.

"It's not enough," she tells him, like he cares that she's drowning.

"Do you want me to help you?"

"Yes. Yes, please."

"I'll come home with you."

Alarms flare in her head, which is stupid because he's already been in her apartment and if he wanted to murder her in her sleep, he'd have done it. He'd waited patiently for her to ride the train again, to come find him.So despite every impulse to protect herself from this strange man, she invites him in with a heady nod.

There are still two more stops.

"I can't make it," she insists, squirming her hips against his hold. Her need is stronger than his restraint. His hands give her room, and he groans as her body writhes. Maybe if she keeps it up, he won't be able to make it either. Much more of this, and she'll pull him down onto the floor of the train car and —

"Stop."

His voice shakes with the weight of a command she can't refuse. Rey goes still, and slowly, quivering, she nods. With no way to help push herself towards relief, she has only her whimpering to rely on.

"It hurts," she explains, for the ache between her thighs has begun to grow intolerable.

"I know."

The train rocks to a stop and the doors slide open. More drunk twenty-somethings pile in. The cold air of the platform draws Rey's attention to the sweat beading on her forehead. By this point, her breath is coming out in short, trembling bursts. Holding still is an impossible task when her whole body is sweltering, stifled by the cramped train.

She cannot imagine how Ben thinks any omega has enslaved an alpha when she is the one reduced to begging for him like this, but she doesn't have the wherewithal to question him just now. He seems so _composed_ by contrast, steady against her back.

His fingers take to stroking her more deliberately, concentrated, pressing the coarse, damp fabric of her panties down to brush small circles around her clit until the tremor that runs down her legs grows too pronounced, until she cannot smother her satisfied noises, until —

When she comes, it is with his tongue pressed to her scent gland. She has bitten down on her fist to smother the sound of her climax, which only dumps molten desire into her veins, heavier than before.

"Here," she tells him. "Let's get off here."

"Your apartment is as the next stop."

"I don't care."

"You will." Certainty keeps his voice tight. "When it lasts, you will."

She trusts him to take care of her, so she says nothing more on the subject. Instead, she leans back into him, turns her face to nuzzle into his neck in turn, the only way she can reach him when he won't give her room to move her hips.

When the train chimes her stop, they are already at the doors. Her slick has left a damp spot in the center of Ben's groin, but his pants are dark, and it barely shows. Except she can smell it, and it makes her more impatient to see that she has _marked him_ in some way, just as he had marked her. She still sports the bruises.

"I'm going to ruin you," he promises to keep her going. And she believes it. In that moment, it's an indisputable truth. He will fuck her like she's never been fucked before, sate the ache mounting in her abdomen, soothe her fever. He will fuck her well and right. "When I'm done with you, you won't be able to walk. You don't want to get caught in the freeze."

And he's right, of course; she doesn't. But soon she can't move her feet under her.

To Rey's great surprise, he takes her up into his arms. At first she thinks he means to carry her like that the whole way, but soon he has thrown her more haphazardly over his shoulder so he can pick up the pace. It's not particularly dignified, but his hands have started to wander up against the seam of her pants, his thumb strumming against her clit, and she forgets to care.

Later, she will recognize that he never asks her for her key.

Right now it doesn't matter, though, because they're through the front door and without shutting it he deposits her on the floor and climbs over her, pulling one of her thighs up around him so they can both grind against one another's thighs, a futile and pointless exercise when she has already made it clear —

"Inside." Her throat is dry, her voice scratchy. "Now."

If either of them isn't clean, it doesn't matter anyway at this point. There's no sense in pretending. And the omega in her frankly doesn't want to even consider preventing pregnancy when she could instead consider the crisply wrapped presents he'd brought her, but tenfold and tucked under a lopsided tree for their children. He was so strong, strong enough to carry her halfway here, he would make such a good mate. Perfect.

No. No, grinding isn't nearly enough.

Before she can get her pants unbuttoned, Ben has already set about trying to help her, yanking them down. He gets them to her knees and rolls her over, apparently satisfied with the bare access he has. He pushes up her coat, the same one he'd replaced, and he pins one hand to the back of her neck while the other pulls her hips up higher, arches her spine.

Were she not in the throes of heat, the way he handles her might feel demeaning. As it stands, she mewls her contentment and wriggles into position to help him, sprawling out on her own carpeting.

"Is this what my omega needs?" He asks as his cock glides between the firm muscle of her ass.

Squirming, panting, Rey nods.

"Oh, yes, yes, please."

"Do you think you deserve it?"

"I've been so patient."

"You have." He agrees, and that low approving rumble is almost enough on its own to tip her over. The trouble is that other friction isn't cutting it for her anymore. Everything feels muted except the white-hot sensation of his thick shaft pressed against her.

The anticipation is more, knowing how it will cleave her apart, how he'll fill her, and how his knot will expand to hold them together. Her skin crawls as he peels his own pants away, as she feels his velvet skin pressed bare to hers. The joyful sound she makes verges on pained, anguished, for its neediness.

"I told you. I told you I'd give you anything you want, didn't I?"

"Yes." Rey's voice lilts higher. She can't budge under his weight, so it's all she has, rocking to try and brush the curve of her ass against his cock, hoping to entice him to something. "I want it, Ben. I want your cock."

"No. Say what you really mean."

Her face burns, but she's beyond shame. After a moment to swallow down enough breath, she answers solidly.

"Your knot. I want your knot."

He slides home then, as if he could only wait long enough for her to get the words out, as if it killed him as much as it killed her to wait, to drag it out. She expected the relief to be instantaneous, to wash over her, but it's only enough to knock the edge off her ache. She still burns for him.

Even when he starts to move, each thrust made easier by the copious slick that has trickled down her legs, it drives her _towards_ something instead of chipping away it. He won't let her thrust back against him. She tries, and his grip on her neck tightens, his other arm coming to bar around her abdomen, holding her steady.

"Perfect," he whimpers into her ear. "Such a sweet little cunt, and it's all mine."

"Yes," she repeats, her tongue practically lolling out of her mouth. She'd say anything to make him happy now, agree to whatever he wanted. "Yours. Just yours."

The angle's never quite right to bring her off, after that. Or maybe it is, but she's waiting for something else because the minute she can feel him start to pulse and quiver inside of her, Rey feels it descend. A sudden, rippling tension, and then the crisp, crashing wave of bliss. His knot swells inside of her, much to her whimpering.

Their clothes are still on. Half-on, at least, and they're not in much better position than they had been that first time. In fact, anyone who walks past her apartment door is probably getting quite a look at Ben's ass.

"Help me with these," she mumbles once she has her wits about her. Wits here, as it turns out, is a generous estimation. She does not have any wits anymore: only enough to work together to shed their clothes so they can both enjoy the press of bare skin in the aftermath while they wait for his knot to go down.

They're out the window again shortly after she pulls herself off his deflated knot.

It's maddening, being this out of control, slave to her urges — like the only thing that's keeping her sane is the thick flood of his cum inside of her, and the swollen knot holding it in.

They get the front door shut before she drags him into her bedroom.

The floor is a mess of dirty clothes, and there are old takeout containers on her nightstand. If the room smells like sweat and unwashed sheets, he says nothing of it. In fact, he breathes deep, like he's savoring it. Probably is. Probably savoring _her._

She rides him, that time, pins him to the bed — to his great surprise, because he erupts with "I'm not sure that's how it's supposed to—" before she bottoms out on his dick — and curls up on his chest to lapse into a short sleep while he stays hot and heavy inside of her.

Sometime while she's asleep he disappears. She's left whining, kicking out her feet, squirming uselessly on the mattress. He comes back to it, hovers at the bedside, stroking her hair.

"You left," she accuses.

"Just to find food." He's frowning. Of course he's frowning. He'd have noticed. "There's nothing in the fridge."

"I'm sorry." It becomes a wail, tears spilling out of her before she knows what to do with them. This has never happened. When she cries, it's to a purpose. Significant for its rarity. But she's suddenly weeping and sputtering and trying to apologize for not feeding herself properly to a man with no investment in that, except it seems like he _is_ invested in it because he cradles her to his chest and soon enough he's inside of her again.

Rey has had lovers before. A respectable amount of casual sex with betas. She'd even fucked Finn once, just to figure out if it was like that (it wasn't). It's never been like this. Not just the frequency, though that too, but the intensity. Like she's constantly teetering on some profound vulnerability with him.

That time, he fucks her slowly, and she cries her way through it — at first at the hollow loneliness that has likewise kept her cabinets and fridge shelves bare, but then in relief and need, for he fills that space within her so well, just like his cock does.

When they surface again, he orders delivery, and they eat it together in her bed, and the sun is already up. He takes her phone to text her boss that she won't be in, which she only knows because he tells her about it when she resurfaces from a coma.

"Is it always like this?" She asks, mouth dry. He goes to the bathroom to refill her water cup, and hands it off to her. Even he looks gaunt and shaky by the end of the day. It's like she's forgotten how to be anything but tired or hungry or horny or all three at once.

He doesn't have a good answer for her.

That's the last coherent thought she has before his rut starts, and they're both lost.

She's babbling incoherent praise about how she's never had a cock as good as his, how no one's ever made her feel like this, how she can't do it anymore and she needs it all the same time — all true, to be fair — when she feels it.

Teeth scraping at the scent gland on her neck.

The first is a testing bite. She knows this because he then says, "Never gonna need another. You're mine. I'll take care of my omega."

But she barely knows him. Fear is a more powerful motivator than her heat, today. Mating bonds are the way alphas control their omegas. Mating bonds are permanent, cost omegas their sanity, turn them into incubators to breed alphas' children. She has worked hard for a life of her own, and even as her body screams to let him do whatever he wants, to open herself up, to let him fuck inside every part of her and spread her wide, panic rises to meet it.

She has heard horror stories of mated pairs. Omegas trapped to monsters. Claiming bites that hurt like nothing else, or so betas whisper as they scowl that omegas are filthy because they enjoy the pain.

When he bites down, he gets a mouthful of pillow instead of skin because that's what she has shoved between him and her mating gland. He's left snarling and possessive for it, throwing the pillow away, fucking harder and deeper into her, pounding her like he never has before, like he wants to break her, or at least ruin her for any other alpha.

Her cunt wrings him dry for that, and even after his knot swells, he continues spurting intermittently inside of her. She can feel it more acutely now, full as she is with thick semen. Her sheets are a lost cause. She doesn't have any to replace them.

The clouded lack of awareness has slowly started to pale as they come down from that high, both of them clearer than they've been for two days. _Two days._ God, had they really been going that long? She stares at her phone in disbelief, his knot still rooted inside of her.

"Put that away," he orders.

She complies, but still says, "My friends are worried about me."

"Because they don't know?"

She nods.

"I … thought one of them might be an alpha." There's a strange furrow to his brow. She has to twist to see it, but his silence makes it a worthwhile endeavor. He shifts them so he can sit back on the bed, pulling her into his lap, stroking his hands along her breasts, her hips, her stomach, her thighs. This is something he enjoys, she has noticed. Exploring her. Getting to know her. Eventually, he arrives at his point, when she gives him the time, "I could not think of another reason that you would refuse my claim."

"Because I don't _know you_. You stole from me, and you won't even tell me why." She sputters it out in disbelief. "And you just got done telling me that you think I'm just going to brainwash and enslave you." No, not just. That was two days ago now. She doesn't know how to process that. She shakes it off and charges ahead. "Why do you get to pick and choose what parts of being an alpha you like, and what kind of an omega I have to be?" 

No. He doesn't seem to grasp that either. Rey huffs and buries her face in the mattress, dropping her phone after all.

"Forget it."

"All of those things are true." He says it like it's mostly for himself. Then, to confirm, he asks, "You don't want me?"

"I didn't say that."

"I've taken care of you. You are _mine."_

"Fat chance." She throws back an elbow into his ribs, and he grunts. Except she's pretty sure she just felt a fresh spurt of cum, and it wasn't just all that he'd already pumped into her moving around. Honestly, he's kind of disgusting. "I'm no one's. I made sure of that. You're welcome for that, by the way. Made it trough a heat brainwashing-free. No need to pick out monogrammed towels and names for our children. You're not trapped. If you just steer clear, I won't … I shouldn't trigger you again."

"That's—" He looks confused. She cannot imagine why, but he swallows whatever realization he has had. "… Yes. That's true."

"Great." She huffs out a breath.

He doesn't seem to know what to say, so he lapses into saying nothing. Eventually, the knot goes down, and Rey climbs off of him.

"I need to shower," she tells him. "And I really need to get this place cleaned, or these sheets are done for." She gestures loosely. "You can go, if you want."

"Do you … want me to go?"

"Until I know why you took my bloody keycard, I certainly don't want you to stay."

Surely he could grasp _that._ But he only stares at her for a while, his cum trickling down her inner thighs. So much of it.

The room is thick with the scent of their lovemaking. It's intoxicating, even to her. She doesn't blame him for being hypnotized. If it lingers here too long, it's liable to drive her crazy. Already she can feel her blood screaming at her for refusing such a perfect alpha, one who would protect her and their children, who had met her needs. This isn't how it's supposed to work. She found a good, strong alpha. Omegas do not just throw them out on the porch after their knots went down.

But neither do alphas detest the notion of claiming an omega, treating it like a burden. He has only himself to blame for this.

"I'll go." He registers it numbly.

Rather than hold onto him like she wants to, Rey just nods. That sounds right. Like everyone else in her life, it's time for him to leave rather than step up, rather than prove she has some kind of value to him. Better that she lets him.

So they part ways, and Rey gets into the shower. When she's done scrubbing off her heat, perplexed all the while by how _confusing_ he manages to be, not least of all because of how little she knows him, Rey gets out and wraps herself in her only towel and opens all the windows to let the thick alpha musk breathe.

She wants to suffocate herself on it, so she knows she needs to let it go.

It's three days later that she comes home and opens the door to a fresh set of sheets on the bed, fresh fruit in the fridge, and her keycard on the kitchen counter.

Beside it, this time, the note has a phone number on it.

Whatever key he's using to get in, she really needs to get it back from him. But for tonight, instead, she eats her way through an entire container of strawberries while watching Netflix and trying not to think about what she's going to do with that note.


	3. two masters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben proves something to them both.

He doesn't ride the three-thirty train anymore.

Rey feels silly for getting on it. It's Christmas Eve, technically. No one else is there, home with their families probably. Rey, she'll spend Christmas Day with Finn and Rose. They don't have any family either, and for Rose it's recent, so.

Leia has agreed to take them in. Feed them. It's kinder than a boss ought to be, but Rey isn't going to complain. She just gets off the empty train and returns to her empty apartment and when she wakes up at noon, she spends the day watching Hallmark movies about the Christmas spirit and crying over paper-thin people who don't exist.

She's always been a sucker for them, and it keeps her from looking at the piece of paper she has pinned to her fridge with her lone magnet (which advertises a carwash, and came free in the mail).

She has not messaged or called Ben since he left that day. She could bring herself to hope she might bump into him, but not to call -- even after he came by and stocked her fridge and replaced her sheets the way a good alpha ought to.

That part stings the worst — knowing that if he would allow himself, he could be a good alpha, and she wanted it for them both. He didn't, though. And she couldn't force him — wouldn't be that shrewish omega he'd fabricated in his mind. So instead she sat alone and tried not to think about the key card he'd left.

On Christmas Day, she goes to Leia's house, and she learns that Leia is Jewish. She supposes she should have known, but it makes the whole thing comical on some level — three orphans stay with their Jewish boss. The true meaning of Christmas. They drink gluhwein and exchange gifts and when she's feeling particularly sentimental, wondering where her parents are in all this, she makes her way to the bathroom in Leia's expansive mansion home.

She gets lost.

It's an accident, really. She miscounts the doors. Opens a bedroom that she expects to be a bathroom and heads inside because, well, it must be an en-suite. But the bedroom looks like it hasn't been lived in for years. Not like a guest room, but like a museum. She uses the bathroom, and there, on her way out, she sees it.

A photo on the dresser of a boy in a graduation cap and gown. Class of '09, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's _Ben._

Ben whose last name she'd never received.

Ben who had taken her key card.

Ben Organa.

She rolls the name over on her tongue. _Ben Organa._ It sounds wrong. She can't stand it. She feels dizzy when she stumbles out of the room, and she is in the living room before she realizes that she still has the photo frame in her hand.

Leia's concerned. Rey starts crying.

When it all comes out, she feels worse for it. According to Leia, she hasn't spoken to Ben in more than five years. He won't come around anymore, not since the accident with his father, who didn't make it. Ben blamed himself and got invested with the wrong people, and now … now, to her great chagrin, he works for the competition.

The fucking competition.

He's not a mugger or a stalker. He's a corporate spy, and he had used Rey.

And Leia, Leia has the gall to _apologize for him._ Like it's her fault.

That only makes Rey cry more, and eventually, after Rose and Finn have politely excused themselves with supportive reassurances, Leia finally convinces Rey that she should stay in this ridiculous mansion tonight. Given that she's in no shape to go home, Rey agrees.

Like an idiot.

It must be three in the morning by the time she settles down on Ben's old bed, still half-drunk and red around the eyes. Leia has left her alone. She's showered out her feelings of hurt. They rise up like poison off his sheets, though, the whole room suffocating her. If she'd been smart, she'd have asked for a guest room, not something haunted, but she's a masochist and cannot help but want to believe she can still scent the last traces of him.

Then she reaches out onto the nightstand and she unlocks her phone.

She saved his number. Of course she did. She texts him now.

_> Why did you do it? _

It's stupid, of course. He won't reply. It's to late, and it's Christmas, but she's in the only place he ought to be with the only person he ought to be spending time with. Absurdly, it occurs to her in the silence that Ben, too, is Jewish, and Christmas probably means even less to him.

She knows he won't reply. He's asleep already.

But he does.

_Do what? <_

_> You used me._

_Rey. <_

_> Give me an explanation. I deserve to know. _

_> You told me I was the one who couldn't be trusted, while you were doing that. _

_> Did you get what you wanted? Before you gave my key back, did you find something? _

_This is more complicated than you realize. <_

_> You're a piece of shit. _

_You already knew that. <_

She laughs, then. It's such a ridiculous thing to say. It's a broken and unhappy laugh, but a laugh all the same. This was a mistake. All of it, top to bottom. He's miserable about it too. She knows that, now. He agreed with her.

_> She's your mother. _

_Are you upset because I left her? Or because she isn't yours? <_

_> Fuck you._

_> Don't. _

_> Don't you dare speak to me again. You can't keep doing this._

_> You can't hate her, conspire against her, and then break into my house with gifts._

_> You can't loom over me like some ghost and tell me I'm the one controlling you._

_> I don't want to hear it. I don't want anything from you._

Still, despite all of this, she expects him to reply. It's been a half hour before she realizes he's not going to. It's another half hour before she finally falls asleep on that bed.

 

* * *

 

Ben doesn't sleep anymore. It would be nice to claim it was just that night, a result of staring into space and waiting for the right thing to say to some to him, or better yet, waiting for the burden of his need for Rey to accept him to burn away. She won't leave. The scent of her clings to him, clouds his mind, leaves him aching and empty.

In the morning, he still has to go to Snoke with what he's found.

He should not have held onto it this long. He should have turned it over days ago, but he'd waited. Some sick, simpering part of him had held onto the hope that Rey would open herself to him again. Realizing it now nauseates him, how pathetic he had been, how willing to --

Not anymore.

Pointedly he does not examine that she had specifically wanted nothing from him, how she'd never sought to solicit his inner alpha and the way it craved to be needed.

Instead he rouses himself from sleepless rest, makes his bed with painstaking precision to try and distract himself with the details. Then he gathered up the file he had secured from the Resistance during the company's holiday party, when the offices were empty, and he brought it back to First Order Enterprises.

Snoke is waiting for him.

Gaunt as always, Ben's employer slouches in a leather chair at the end of a clear glass boardroom table, wearing an ostentatious suit of gold. Ben would not be surprised to hear it was coated in real gold leaf. It is the kind of thing Snoke would do. He has always been gauche. Ben doesn't flinch at it anymore, moving briskly past Hux to drop off the file.

Hux does a double take. Ben hears it happen. The redhead, who Ben has worked with for seven years now, lingers in the doorway.

"You can leave, Armitage," says Snoke in a gravelly voice.

The scent has wafted, filled the room, and Ben realizes too late that his greater mistake is not waiting so long to give up on Rey reaching out again, but in not waiting long enough to let the scent of her heat leave him.

Hux is sorry to miss it, but leave he does. No one refuses an order from Snoke.

The door shuts.

"You reek," Snoke tells him. "Did you think I would not recognize her foul stench? At least do me the courtesy of washing off your humiliation."

"I tried."

Ben sounds hollow, saying it. Shame creeps through.

"Did she bring you to heel? Make you beg like a dog?" He snarls. "Just like your father."

The assertion rankles something in the base of Ben's neck. His mouth twitches with the urge to snap back, but he reins it in. His father had been an omega. But that was what omegas did -- made alphas more like them. Made them weak and desperate.

That was what Snoke taught him.

When he was with Rey, though, he hadn't felt weak. Desperate, yes. But alive. Irreplaceable. He blinks back any further consideration of the moment, lest Snoke somehow sniff out a hormonal response to it.

"I broke her," Ben returns in bold declaration, lifting his eyes to meet Snoke's. "I ruined her. She gave me everything."

"Do not lie to me." Snoke bares his teeth, pounding a closed fist on top of the manila filing folder that Ben brought before him. "It's not just omega I smell on you. You stink of _heat_."

He infuses the word with such loathing, such disgust. Immediately, Ben's eyes drop. Bone-deep humiliation for having succumbed to his instincts withers him instantly.

"I got you what you wanted," he defends. "The files."

Snoke drops the file back to the table, disdainful of it.

"They mean nothing if I cannot depend upon you to keep your head here, with our work." _Our work,_ Snoke says, like it is something they share, and not something he demands. Ben feels much more like Snoke's bitch than Rey's in this moment. He chews on the inside of his cheek, smothering the sentiment. "I will not be succeeded by a child who cannot be trusted to resist his most basic impulses."

"I didn't succumb." Ben hisses the words through gritted teeth. "I was in control."

The smack of Snoke's head echoes through the room. His face burns with it. It is more of an insult, to be honest, than an actual strike. It makes Ben feel like he's not worth that much.

"Do not forget your place." Snoke is on his feet now, and he turns away to walk to the window, considering the city below like he owns it. "A bonded alpha cannot be trusted to remain loyal to any but their omega. If you are having doubts, considering straying, perhaps I should groom Phasma in your stead."

"No." Ben chokes it out. "I am loyal."

"A dog cannot serve two masters."

Ben is not a fucking dog.

He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to -- Snoke likes to hear himself talk, anyway.

"Prove that I can still trust you. Bring her to me." He turns back to look at Ben. "And I'll help you get rid of the bitch."

Relief shudders through Ben at the mere suggestion. Freedom. That's what Snoke is offering. Freedom from Rey, at least. Even if the well is poisoned, just as likely to trap him, it sounds sweet in the moment. _Necessary._ His shoulders slacken, and he watches a smirk curl across Snoke's lips.

 

* * *

 

 

He waits for her on a bench across the street from her apartment.

On the list of creepy shit he's done, it's pretty high. But they're well past this. The last time he'd done it -- and he had done it before -- he'd been waiting for her to leave, that he might carry up all the items he'd retrieved for her, that he might make his offering. Seduce her. Sway her. Convince her that she ought to let him mate her because he was better than any of those other alphas, that he could take care of her.

What a fool he'd been.

It is just past sunset when she arrives home. Her cheeks are red. He knows these things to mean she has been out drinking with her coworkers. None of them are alphas, but he feels the surge of defensiveness anyway, possessiveness. She belongs to him.

She'll belong to no one soon.

This thought does not dispel the primal sentiments, provides him no comfort.

He pushes through anyway. He has to do this. It's the only way to be free of her, to regain his strength, to be the man he once was. If he does this, the conflict he feels will be gone. He counts three minutes before he gets off the bench and heads for her building. She'll already be inside, maybe in the shower.

A lump forms in his throat at the thought of Rey naked and wet. He dispels it as he slips into her apartment.

Few things have moved, but the differences are notable in the fact that it's far cleaner. She has been preoccupied. He's sorry to find that it no longer smells like him. Then he's sorry to realize that he's sorry for it. Damn this omega.

She's not in the living space of her apartment, so he quietly cracks the door to her bedroom. Inside, Rey is laying on her bed, her back to him. He can see her scrolling through her phone messages, hear her sniffling, _smell_ her grief and loneliness. She needs him, his omega. He realizes too late that if he can smell her, then she --

Rey sits up suddenly, whips around to stare at him, her eyes wide and rimmed red, cheeks still wet though she ceases her active weeping immediately. She stares at him. Trembles in that spot, watching him, trying to suss out what he's there for.

Feeling him out.

"Get out," she tells him finally.

He advances on her.

"I said _get out."_ Rey gets to her feet, putting the bed between them. The bed he'd pinned her down on and fucked her, where he'd felt holy, where he felt loved for the first time.

He swallows it all back, fights through the haze of his own pathological need to protect her, to shelter her, to nurture her, comes across the bed and pins her instead to the window. His hands seize her wrists as she tries to fight him back, and she does a good job. She gets her elbow into his face before he twists her around, presses her cheek into the window and his chest into her back.

"Just like the alley," he murmurs in her ear. "Do you remember?"

And then, when he says it, he can smell her arousal. Thick. Tangy. He licks the gland in her neck, drags the flat of his tongue across it, and feels her shudder under him. Yes. She remembers.

"Let go," she says more quietly. "I don't want anything to do with you."

She's afraid that he's going to claim her. That he would mate her now, after she refused him.

"Too late."

He grabs a handful of her hair and slams her head against the window frame by it. Blood trickles from the wound he leaves behind, but she goes slack in his arms. Unconscious. Pliable. He locks the apartment behind him and brings her downstairs to his car.

She won't forgive him for this.

 

* * *

 

Rey comes to in a place she doesn't recognize. It's not a warehouse. Not quite. Maybe an office space, but one poorly decorated, in the midst of remodeling. Splitting pain throbs in her skull, dazing her, preventing her from taking it all in at once.

All she remembers is going home, and then --

Ben.

He's sitting across from her in a chair. She lunges for him, but finds that she can't get far. Her core tightens, and she thrashes forward, but she is strapped down, tied to her chair, while he sits comfortably in his.

The movement makes her nauseous, though.

"What do you want?" she asks, realizing what little else she can do.

"I have what I want." He sounds cold. Removed. Like on the train. The sound trickles through her spine. "Now we wait."

"Ben," she reasons. "Don't do this. Whatever it is, we can talk. We can--"

He's unstable. She'd fucked an unstable man who'd _mugged her,_ how surprised can she be that he has abducted her too? Of course he's unstable.

Poor Leia.

Her thoughts are disconnected, fragmented. Before she can get more out, the door over his shoulder opens. A man in a hideous golden suit walks in, looking half a corpse. He is pale and skinny and bald and covered in age spots. Like a wraith. Like Pestilence. Rey lifts her head, searches between them as Ben gets to his feet to greet the man.

"This scrap of a thing is the one who seduced you?" The stranger's voice is a sickly rumble. Thick like syrup. "She doesn't look like much."

Ben says nothing. Lowers his head, as if in deference, and Rey understands immediately that this man is the one. The alpha that he learned from. The one who filled his head with all that bullshit he'd spewed at her, warped and toxic and pathological.

Rey thrashes at her binds. He has used duct tape to hold her to the chair, so in addition to holding fast, it tears at the tiny hairs in her arms with every stinging tug.

"Leia knows what you've done," she snarls. "Whatever you do to me won't change anything."

"It will," says the alpha. "It will change my successor's heart."

Creases line her forehead. This isn't about the Resistance? It's about her. She can't parse it fully, doesn't understand, and Ben won't look at her. Coward. Bastard.

"No. She's not much at all." The more the alpha talks the more she wants to tear out his throat with her teeth. He is the threat here, the threat to _her_ alpha, the one who had helped her through her heat, the one who had been so good to her. He had doted on her. Cared for her. Shown her a softness no one else ever had, and now -- This other alpha draws closer. Thin, bonelike fingers close around her chin to hold her steady, to tilt her face up to look at him. "But they don't need to, do they? That's the trouble with an omega. They get inside of your head, Ben. Make you believe whatever they need you to believe. Did you think you were the only one that she had?"

Beside him, Ben finally turns, stricken by the sight, the consideration. Something screams in her chest, howls to correct him, but chokes it down. She will not defend herself against these accusations because whether or not it's the truth has no bearing on how they're treating her. She has nothing to defend herself against. She could have fucked every alpha in Chicago and still have no good reason to be stuck here.

"Provided the right stimulation, she would behave with the same wanton looseness for any number of alphas." He's smiling as he looks at her face, like he is imagining it, and Rey spits in his face. He cuffs her across the cheek and straightens. "A pity. Were she not so dangerous, we could keep her. I could show you the foul creature she really is."

She can smell it then. Ben's rage, mounting. Like burning cinnamon and something sickly sweet to the point that it's almost foul, like rotting fruit. How can this alpha not smell it too? He must know that he has enraged Ben, not won him back.

But he doesn't. Instead he pulls a pistol from his belt, hidden under his suit jacket, and holds it out to Ben by the barrel.

"Instead, you'll have to deal with her quickly. These offices will be demolished in the morning. Rest assured, Ben, no trace will be left behind. You have my protection."

Ben stares at the gun. Rey twists the tape on her wrists.

"No," she erupts with finally, interjecting. "No, Ben, don't."

It is not her life she is pleading with. She doesn't want him to be the creature that he believes an alpha is about -- a beast of rage and impulse and power and ocntrol and nothing else. Hideous. Brutal. She can see it forming in his eyes.

The alpha in his gold suit laughs, continues laughing, thinking she is pleading for her life. He scorns her. Rey lets out another frantic keening sound of protest as the gunshot rings out, and that alpha crumples to the floor. She does not weep for him -- he is a monster and doesn't deserve her tears -- but she is in shock.

"You're not what he wants you to be," she tells him. "This isn't what an alpha is."

"It is," he replies. "When it means protecting what is mine, it is."

And she likes that very much. _Mine._ She has never liked to be owned until him, but there is something reverential to how he says it. Rey feels her body grow warm with it, despite the faint churn of disgust in her stomach.

The alpha's corpse remains there, still, cooling. Ben sets the pistol down on his chair and kneels before her in the growing pool of his old master's blood. Her ankles are bound to either leg of the chair, knees parted, and he slides his hands up her thighs to take advantage of the fact.

Rey's breath catches in her throat when his fingers brush her core through the fabric of her pants.

"Ben," she says.

"No."

She knows what he wants. His hands glide up and down her thighs again. Looking down into his eyes, she sees only pitch black pools of hunger. Unfettered. Her toes curl in her boots.

"Alpha."

He shivers. She feels it happen, watches the skin of his neck prickle around the deep v-neck of his black t-shirt. Rey finds herself short of breath, but she treads water, desperate to keep above the tide.

"Why? You didn't want this." Her voice is made weak by reluctance. She doesn't want to question a good thing, doesn't want to deny herself the chance to belong, to be happy, as she had been with him in the thick of her heat. Not when she has gone so long without that sort of fulfillment. But she has to. "… Do you?"

He reaches up very carefully, delicately even, and brushes hair behind her shoulder, exposing her mating gland. The dizziness she feels is in no part due to her head injury, she is sure. He's so close to it, his touch as intoxicating as ever.

"A dog cannot serve two masters."

"What?"

She's not sure she's heard him right.

"You smell …" He breathes deep. "Like you're mine."

"You don't want to be mine." She grits her teeth, saying it. Holding onto that. " _Do you?"_

He needs to say it. He needs to be the one to --

"Let me." He offers it up so readily that it shocks her into silence. "Let me be yours." After a tremulous moment, something in his expression crumbles and he adds, " _Please."_

Refusing him is beyond her. Rey tilts her chin up, her chest fluttering, her eyes drifting shut, and she wets her lips before she answers, "Yes."

He doesn't mate her in that precise moment. Instead his tongue drags across the gland again, soothing her, bringing her peace and warmth and a heavy cloak of comfort. She twists and writhes until the tape has twisted to be so stringy as to be painful. He sets her loose then, cutting her free, and he pushes the chair aside to bring her down to the floor of this dirty, blood-soaked condemned office together.

Free now, and unburdened by her heat, Rey claws desperately for a sense of control, counters and pins him, rocking her hips down against the firm ridge that bulges at his fly. He is as thick and solid as she remembered.Distantly she recognizes the lurid noises that fill the air are coming from her, lilts of pleasure that spill out as she grinds against him.

It doesn't last long that way. She could have, she thinks, gotten herself off just rutting against him, but he doesn't make her. The tear each other out of their clothes, a frenzy, and he allows her to remain saddled on his hips. Allow, she knows, because the way he bucks and thrashes shifts her weight entirely, disrupting her, as their bare skin glides, as her arousal soaks him. Slick, sticking to him, to her inner thighs, glinting in the low light.

"Mine," she tells him. "I'm going to make you mine."

"Already am," he growls as he pulls her down for a kiss, but then she reaches between them, presses his cockhead against her entrance, and he hisses like he could not have anticipated how hot she would be, how wet she would feel.

She has to confess, in the quiet of her own mind, that she had been worried -- worried that after her heat, nothing would compare. She'd been so desperate, so wild, so uninhibited. It is a relief to find that as she sinks too-quick onto his cock, relishing the pleasure-pain of the immediate stretch, that her worries were misplaced. He's perfect.

That is when he loses control. That is when she knows he has only allowed her to remain where she sits. He grips her arms, pulls her wrists behind her back in one hand, and uses the scraps of tape to bind her again. It is so abrupt that from anyone else she would suspect it to be premeditated -- but she does not believe Ben has ever premeditated anything with her. Not effectively. Not with any follow-through.

Regardless, the effect is the same. Her arms are bound behind her, throwing off her balance, and he grips her hips then to begin thrusting violently up into her.

A hollow, choking cry slips out as his cock drives into just the right spot, rolling her eyes back, and she bows over him, losing her balance, burying her forehead in the slope of his neck.

"Good," she praises. "So good, Alpha, thank you."

"For you," he tells her. And she believes him.

"My alpha." She says it with such admiration, such praise. Marvels over it, when nothing has ever been hers before. He twitches within her as she says it -- she can feel it.

He raises one hand to grip her hair again, as he had in her apartment, but this time when he pulls back on it, he exposes her neck rather than knocking her unconscious. A real improvement.

Her gland is swollen, aching for attention, _aflame_ with need.

Whatever fears she may have had about the pain are gone. She whimpers out, "Please. Please, Alpha, do it."

When he sinks his teeth in, her vision goes white, and her whole body convulses, collapsing like a nebula into blinding bliss. Warmth dumps into her veins as his scent mingles with hers -- for good, forever. Hers. He snarls into her throat, pulls her forcefully down onto his cock while she can barely feel her legs let alone move them, and spends himself in her. Blood trickles from her newfound mating scar as his knot swells, and her body is still rippling with the aftershocks of her climax.

Panting, rasping, she rests her forehead on his collarbone. Her shoulders ache with being held. Her scalp stings. Her head throbs with the threat of concussion. She forgets them in the fuzzy high. And for the first time in her life, Rey knows with indefatigable certainty that she will never be alone again -- not really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for taking this wild ride with me that was somehow three times as long as I thought it was going to be. This is really and truly the end. Your overwhelming support definitely helped me crank out these other two chapters, and I'm hoping that this ending is more satisfying than the ambiguous open ending of the original.


End file.
